Nina Simone

While stories of American vocal legend Nina Simone’s erratic onstage behaviour are well documented, for those with only the singer’s audio output as a guide the abject freakiness captured in this collection of Simone’s Montreux appearances will be a disheartening eye-opener. The craziness begins the moment she enters the room: a completely zoned-out Simone, accompanied by a lone drummer, stands beside her piano staring off into the distance in search of an errant sound no one in the room can hear but her. After a few uncomfortable moments of disjointed dialogue, the singer finally sets into her completely natural and captivating performances of classics "Little Girl Blue,” "Be My Husband” and "I Wish I Knew.” But the disconnected babblings (at one point she stops to search that audience for an obviously absent David Bowie) continue between each song and what you glean from a clearly wrecked Simone is that she, like the now AIDS-stricken Gil Scott Heron, seems a completely broken result of her various Civil Rights experiences, as conversational references to fallen friends slip in and out of her monologue. It’s a sad testament to such a holder of clear musical genius.